Waltzing With a Dictator The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy by Raymond Bonner

IN SEARCH OF A POLICY 379

participate, an invitation which seemed to be a manifestation of
Washington’s frustration in trying to figure out how to deal with
Marcos. Maybe, it was thought, Lansdale’s experiences in the 1950s
might have some relevance in 1986. But Lansdale, who gave the
opening address, offered little more than obvious observations
about how it wasn’t the same situation it had been three decades
before. He added that there was a deep reservoir of goodwill
toward Americans among the Filipino people. Indeed, there was,
although much of it had been expended during the decade of
support for Marcos and martial law, and the well would almost be
drained by Reagan a few months hence. A couple of “outsiders”
were invited to the conference. One was Claude Buss, a professor
emeritus at Stanford, with extensive knowledge and understanding
of the Philippines, dating back to 1935, when he had been assigned
there as a young Foreign Service officer. Another was William H.
Overholt, a vice-president of Bankers Trust, who spent so much
time involved with Philippine policy matters that many wondered
when he ever did any bank work (he was to be very active in Mrs.
Aquino’s campaign). Overholt’s ties to the Philippines went back
to the early seventies, when fresh out of Harvard and Yale (with
a Ph.D. in political science), he had worked on development pro¬
grams in the islands. A conservative Democrat, whose desire to
work for Brzezinski at the NSC had not been realized, Overholt
was a forceful participant at the National War College conference.

For two days at the War College, the covert operators and the
overt thinkers talked, divided into three sections, A, B, and C,
then came together for lunch and at the end of the day to exchange
ideas. “Facilitators” had been brought in, to ensure that the dis¬
cussions didn’t lag. They found themselves with no role; everyone
had plenty to say. About the only time the participants weren’t
talking was when they were watching the Defense Department’s
slide shows, which many found simplistic. The soldiers and dip¬
lomats, the intelligence analysts and policymakers debated whether
or not the United States should launch a covert operation to get
rid of Marcos, an idea that was then being discussed by the Pen¬
tagon. Someone suggested that wouldn’t be possible because Mar¬
cos and Ver controlled the guns. Others raised the issue of Diem
and what had happened after the Kennedy administration had,
actively or passively, endorsed the coup in which he was murdered.

380 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

Another suggestion actively debated was to alter the sentence in
the NSDD that Reagan had signed in January 1985 which said that
Marcos was part of the solution. It should first be amended to
read, it was argued, that Marcos was “not” part of the solution,
then be leaked to the press, thereby sending a message tp Marcos
that Washington was serious about reform. They discussed how in
the next election, whenever it was, the United States would provide
covert support for organizations such as NAMFREL, the citizens’
watchdog committee. They debated how the NPA was to be de¬
feated. Only Marcos could do that, argued a man from the CIA,
a strident conservative whose views chilled some of the partici¬
pants. “He was rabid,” said a participant. “He saw the NPA as
ten feet tall.” Above all, they examined whether Marcos could be
counted on to reform. No way, said Overholt. Buss agreed. So
did Niehaus. In the front row, Wolfowitz, Armacost, and Armitage
seemed to nod in agreement.

Those who believed that Marcos was the cause of the problem,
that the longer the United States stuck with him, the deeper the
quagmire would get, that, in sum, it was time for some decisive
action, were about to acquire some significant support. It came
from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The committee
hadn’t been paying much attention to the Philippines. On the
House side the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific
Affairs had been holding hearings for several years, with a step-
up in activity after the Aquino assassination. The subcommittee
was chaired by Stephen Solarz, the liberal Democrat who had
entered Congress with the Watergate class of 1974, at the age of
thirty-four. Solarz was one of the most traveled members of Con¬
gress. His weren’t junkets but learning trips, from South Africa
to the Middle East to Asia, his taut energy fueled by the ambition
(which he acknowledged) someday to be secretary of state or na¬
tional security adviser. He wasn’t widely liked by his colleagues,
who thought him too brash and a bit too much of a grandstander,
too anxious to dominate issues and the spotlight.

Solarz didn’t have a solution for the Philippine crisis, and he
rejected those that human rights organizations were urging, such
as requiring the president to certify an improvement in human
rights before aid could be continued. Solarz argued that the cer¬
tification legislation, which he had sponsored, hadn’t worked in

IN SEARCH OF A POLICY 381

El Salvador, where the U.S. president routinely certified an im¬
proving human right situation while thousands of Salvadorans were
still being killed by the army and death squads. The effect of this
certification, Solarz and many others thought, was to give a clean
bill of health to a dirty government. While it is certainly true that
the Reagan administration made a mockery of the certification
law, it had nevertheless focused scrutiny on human rights abuses
and as a result, lives were saved because of it. Moreover, the
responsibility for allowing the president to sidestep the certification
law was with the Congress, which should have, but didn’t, enforce
it. Anyway, Solarz didn’t push human rights in the Philippines,
even excluding from his committee hearings human rights orga¬
nizations whose testimony Republican members of the committee,
notably James Leach of Iowa, wanted to hear. But for whatever
Solarz wasn’t doing, at least he was focusing on the Philippines,
forcing the administration to explain its policy in public (many say
this is the only proper role for Congress because the elected rep¬
resentatives aren’t qualified to make foreign policy).

It was more than the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was
doing. Until late 1985 it had ignored the Philippines. The Sub¬
committee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs had been under the
chairmanship of S. I. Hayakawa, the aging and conservative Cal¬
ifornia Republican who actually fell asleep on the job. Hayakawa
was succeeded as chairman by Frank H. Murkowski, Republican
from Alaska. Murkowski, like so many others after the fall of
Marcos, sought to gain credit for having played a positive and
important role. But staff members on the Foreign Relations Com¬
mittee had long been frustrated by Murkowski. “He had absolutely
no interest” in the Philippines, says a staff member. “He had to
be dragged kicking and screaming into the Philippine issue.”

Two Foreign Relations Committee staff members had become
interested: Frederick Z. Brown, who worked on the Republican
side, and Carl Ford, who worked for the Democrats. In 1984 the
two had spent three weeks in the Philippines, an unusually long
period for staff members. They were disturbed by what they
observed and learned, traveling extensively throughout the archi¬
pelago. But the Philippines still wasn’t a pressing issue in the Sen¬
ate, so they worked on the report leisurely, Ford on weekends,
Brown during his vacation to Lake Michigan. A year later, in

382 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

August 1985, Brown went back to the Philippines (Ford was now
back at the CIA), and when he returned to Washington, he wrote
an alarming memorandum.

Brown’s role in the shaping of American policy in the Phil¬
ippines during the last six months of Marcos was, like Maisto’s at
the State Department, far greater than was publicly known. A
former Foreign Service officer, Brown had considerable experience
in intelligence and insurgencies. As an air force lieutenant (before
joining the Foreign Service) he had engaged in intelligence and
photo interpretation in Libya and Morocco. For five years, from
1968 to 1973, he was in Vietnam, where he had a long stint as the
deputy senior adviser for the pacification program in Vinhlong
Province, the controversial program that relocated Vietnamese and
put them under military control. Most of Brown’s Foreign Service
career had focused on Southeast Asia, as the director of State’s
Office of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia Affairs for a year and as
director of the Office of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma,
and Brunei Affairs, which included acting as regional coordinator
for East Asia narcotics matters, for three years.

On his trip to the Philippines in 1985 Brown again traveled
widely. During his last days he spent two hours in a private meeting
with Marcos and three hours with Imelda Marcos. Back in Wash¬
ington, Brown began an intense lobbying effort to convince the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Richard Lugar, to
involve himself actively in the Philippines issue. Lugar was already
bogged down in South Africa and Central America, but he agreed
to take on the Philippines. Though he had no way of knowing it
at the time, within six months he was to play a pivotal role in the
successful resolution of the crisis. With Brown providing crucial
support, the two of them in tandem were often way ahead of the
president of the United States.

But all that was to come. In August 1985 the situation in the
Philippines seemed between bleak and hopeless, “gloom and doom,”
Brown wrote. Within a day after returning to Washington, Brown
set out his views in a confidential memorandum for Lugar. Brown’s
conclusions:

1. President Marcos’s prime objective is to stay in power,
not to promote change which could endanger him in the

IN SEARCH OF A POLICY 383

short term. . . . He does not accept his own mortality
and expects to remain in power indefinitely. He hopes to
manage the present crisis tactically, without yielding to
terms from either the U.S. or his countrymen.
2. Marcos has not gotten our message about the urgent need
for reform. U.S. demands for reform run diametrically
counter to Marcos’ interests. . . .
3. Marcos believes that he enjoys the support of the highest
levels of the U.S. government. Congress may huff and
puff, State Department Assistant Secretaries may harass
him, and some of his military aid monies may be trans¬
ferred to ESF [economic support funds]. But in the end,
the U.S. will not dare to pull its support.
4. Marcos is convinced that Clark and Subic give him the
whip handle in dealing with the U.S. He interpreted the
$70 million level for military assistance as evidence of the
Administration’s desire to satisfy him. . . .
6. The problem in the Philippines begins at the top and ex¬
pands downward. It is difficult to accept the conventional
wisdom that although Marcos is part of the problem, he
is also part of the solution. . . .
7. Time is short. The question is not whether the govern¬
ment can reverse the slide but whether it can stop the
hemorrhage. . . .

It was a grim analysis, as much an indictment of the Reagan admin¬
istration’s timid approach as it was of Marcos. The report was
considered so sensitive that it was distributed only to the members
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It should have been
widely distributed and made public. Maybe that would have con¬
vinced the administration to act. But not necessarily. There wasn’t
anything in the report that Maisto, Abramowitz, Armacost, and
most of the others at State wouldn’t agree with and hadn’t been
saying.

By the fall of 1985 it had become the professionals in the
bureaucracies against the ideologues in the White House. From
Abramowitz to Wolfowitz, there was agreement that Marcos would
not reform. Bosworth knew it, and he was adding that in much of

384 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

the country there simply was no government anymore. Armacost
knew it, having learned the hard way. Carl Ford and his staff at
the CIA had analyzed the situation and Marcos accurately. Over
at Defense, Armitage and Admiral Crowe realized that Marcos
couldn’t and wouldn’t change, and they were growing increasingly
worried about the bases. Having Admiral Crowe, who was chair¬
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the same policy ship as the
State Department was critical, for it meant that State did not have
to fight the Pentagon as it so often did over Philippine policy and
in many other parts of the world.

But just as these high-level American officials couldn’t influ¬
ence Marcos, neither could they reach their superiors in Wash¬
ington. Casey, Weinberger, Bush, McFarlane, even Shultz (though
he was beginning to waver because he was listening to his profes¬
sionals) clung to Marcos. They stuck with Marcos because their
boss, the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, was still
loyal to Marcos. Reagan, and the conservatives around him, re¬
fused to accept the fact that Marcos was as bad as everyone said.
Moreover, they argued, if we get rid of Marcos, the next person
might be worse. The Philippine president was corrupt and repres¬
sive, his American supporters acknowledged. But we had better
stick with him. He’s pro-American; pro-bases; anti-Communist.
“Nicaragua was on everybody’s mind,” says one high-level official.
The Reagan administration and its conservative backers were still
castigating the Carter administration for having abandoned So-
moza. They could not very well abandon Marcos. And now it
wasn’t just the Communists they were talking about as possibly
being worse; the administration conservatives weren’t at all com¬
fortable with many in the democratic opposition in the Philippines
either. They were considered far too liberal; they talked about
removing the bases; they said that to end the war with the Com¬
munists, they would negotiate, would even allow “leftists” into
the government.

On this faith in Marcos, on these fears and beliefs, the policy
ship was floating, then slowly sinking. Desperation reigned. The
administration grabbed for the now-battered life raft: another high-
level mission to talk to Marcos. The problem, the White House
still believed, wasn’t the message but the messenger: Marcos didn’t
take the reform message seriously because he was hearing only

IN SEARCH OF A POLICY 385

from bureaucrats. The State Department had long realized that if
the policy were to be effective, the message would have to be
delivered by someone with clout in the White House; only then
would Marcos listen. The White House ignored State’s proposal.
Then, in August 1985, in an interview with Charles Krause, cor¬
respondent for the MacNeil!Lehrer Newshour, Marcos said:

Your government is divided into bureaucratic factions. There
is one faction there which closes its eyes to reality and has
come out openly against my administration. There is another
faction trying to help us. I won’t mention names, but we have
had some problems with some former ambassadors to the
Philippines who did not see eye-to-eye with some of our
people here. ... I am told that these are the leaders in the
anti-Marcos movement within that faction. The story in the
diplomatic circles of course is that in Washington you need
two ambassadors—one for Congress and another for the Ex¬
ecutive Department.

Marcos didn’t have to name names. Armacost was the former
ambassador, and indeed, he had turned against Marcos. But more
significantly, Marcos drove home what the State Department had
been saying for a year or more: Marcos didn’t believe he had to
listen to anyone because he was convinced that he still had the
support of Ronald Reagan and the White House, that other “fac¬
tion trying to help us.” Marcos was correct, of course, but even
the Reagan White House wanted a reformed Marcos.

If, however, the U.S. president had been serious about deliv¬
ering a message, he would have picked up the phone and called
Marcos, as some in the State Department thought he ought to do.
But Reagan wasn’t about to confront his friend. Other individuals
were considered for the assignment. Former President Ford was
approached. He was willing to undertake the mission to Manila;
but he had other commitments, and before he could rearrange his
schedule, the administration decided he would not be the appro¬
priate emissary. William (“Judge”) Clark, Reagan’s longtime friend
from California, who had been the head of the National Security
Council before moving over to the Department of the Interior,
was considered, as was McFarlane, Clark’s successor at the Na-

386 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

tional Security Council. They were vetoed in part because the
mission was to be secret, and it was thought impossible for either
of those two men to slip in and out of Manila without raising
suspicions. Finally, it was decided to send Senator Paul Laxalt in
October.

The Nevada Republican was eager. He was just beginning to
advance his presidential ambitions, and a visit such as this would
give him some foreign policy experience, which he was almost
completely lacking. For that reason he didn’t want the visit secret.
Nor did he want to alienate voters in Nevada, where he had some
Columbus Day commitments. Thus, he agreed to undertake the
mission, but it had to be public, the White House had to announce
it (getting him off the hook with his constituents), and it had to
be made clear that he was going at the president’s request (which
would bolster his ratings by drawing him even closer to the popular
president). First, the trip was leaked to the Washington Times;
then the White House made the official announcement.

Laxalt’s mission was simple: to convince Ferdinand Marcos
that it wasn’t just the bureaucracy that was talking to him about
reforms, that his good friend Ronald Reagan was also concerned,
also wanted the economic, political, and military reforms. Laxalt
carried Reagan’s imprimatur. The two men were “political, per¬
sonal and ideological soul mates,” wrote veteran Washington po¬
litical correspondents Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, Laxalt
and Reagan had campaigned together for Barry Goldwater in 1964,
both had been elected governors of their respective states in
1966, and Laxalt was Reagan’s presidential campaign chairman in
1976, 1980, and 1984. To underscore his mission, Laxalt carried a
letter from Reagan. It was handwritten, so that Marcos wouldn’t
think that it had been prepared by the bureaucracy and that Reagan
had merely signed it. In response, Marcos wrote his own letter in
longhand, a much longer one. It was filled with the same fantasies
that he fed all Americans: The insurgency wasn’t growing; he was
in control; yes, he’d break up the monopolies; it wasn’t true that
there was no political freedom; martial law had been necessary in
1972; Filipinos were better off materially than they had been when
Marcos became president.

The administration told the Washington Post, which reported

IN SEARCH OF A POLICY 387

the story prominently on the front page, that Laxalt had delivered
“an extremely blunt message of warning,” that it was “the bluntest
presidential message ever delivered to a friend.” But it wasn’t so.

“He did not deliver a blunt message,” says an embassy officer
about Laxalt. It was “a love feast,” says another. Laxalt assured
Marcos that Ronald Reagan was still his friend. It was the darn
Congress that was causing all the trouble. So, if he’d just do a few
of these things, there’d be no more problem. Laxalt told Marcos
that one of his major problems was his image in the United States,
which an aggressive public relations effort could correct.

The Laxalt mission was a success—for Marcos. He had ex¬
pected much worse. He told American diplomats later that he
thought Laxalt was going to suggest he resign. Like the Casey visit,
the Laxalt mission was a disaster for the State Department. “Mar¬
cos came away the winner,” a State Department official com¬
mented a few weeks after Laxalt’s return. Marcos had again bought
time, with Reagan, Casey, Weinberger, and the others who wanted
to stick with him. Laxalt had been impressed with Marcos, and his
reports on his return were positive.

Marcos was now convinced he could bypass Bosworth, the
embassy, and the State Department. He had his own back channel
to Reagan, through Laxalt. Marcos was continually calling the
Nevada senator. He also hired a public relations firm. When she
was in New York, for another opening session of the United Na¬
tions, Imelda Marcos handed over a check for $60,000 as the down
payment on a one-year contract that called for a total payment of
$950,000. (She told the United Nations General Assembly that the
world’s problems “have their roots in injustice, intolerance, greed
and dominance by the strong.”) The PR firm was Black, Manafort,
Stone & Kelly, a young agency with impeccable conservative cre¬
dentials. Roger Stone was close to Nixon, the friendship from
Stone’s days as a Young Republican who had played some dirty
tricks during the Watergate era. Paul J. Manafort, Jr., thirty-six
years old, who had worked in the Ford White House, handled the
account. Manafort checked with the Reagan White House before
taking on Marcos as a client. The White House said OK. There
might be some in the administration who thought it was time to
tilt away from Marcos—Admiral Crowe of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

388 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

and Michael Armacost, the number three at State, the most senior
men with those views—but the White House was still firmly behind
him.*

Marcos, however, was rapidly losing control. He was under
heavy medication, and all plants and carpets had been stripped
from the palace because they contained chemicals that irritated
his diseases. For long stretches he could work only four to five
hours a day; then, in accord with the nature of his disease, he
would recover and carry on long conversations with journalists and
visitors. During a visit Admiral Crowe sat horrified as Marcos
rambled on incoherently about World War II, his medals, his in¬
juries. In Washington there were stories that Marcos would soon
die. It seemed almost a wish, born of desperation, out of an un¬
willingness to act decisively with a policy. There was also talk in
Washington about hastening his departure from the palace, with
a coup or some other covert operation. Both Armacost and Abram-
owitz were members of a supersecret group known as the 208
Committee (named for the room in the Old Executive Office Build¬
ing where they met). Its function was to oversee the covert wars
and operations that had increased dramatically under Casey and
Reagan, from the war against the Sandinistas to Angola to Af¬
ghanistan. Numerous Filipinos approached the CIA and Pentagon
officials in search of support for a coup.

Though Marcos didn’t know about the 208 Committee, he was
convinced that Washington was out to topple him, that he was to
meet the same fate as Diem. The shah had suffered from similar
delusions prior to his ouster. In late October Marcos asked aides
to research the fall of Diem, Allende, the shah, Somoza, and Park
Chung Hee. He instructed his reseachers to study The New York
Times stories and especially editorials prior to the ouster of these
men. Reflecting an anxiety bordering on paranoia, Marcos told
confidants (who told Americans) that James Nach, the embassy
political officer, was a leader in the effort to destabilize his gov¬
ernment. Marcos was sure of this because Nach had been in Viet-

* Black, Manafort, which was paid $250,000 for its services in December 1985,
terminated its relationship with the Marcos government on February 24, 1986,
the day before Marcos fled.

IN SEARCH OF A POLICY 389

nam—even though Nach’s service in Vietnam had been many years
after Diem’s ouster.

In Washington the possibility of a coup or some other covert
action didn’t go much beyond talk and contingency planning. Mar¬
cos still had important support in the White House. Frustration
reigned.

“The situation is bad. It’s getting worse. Marcos is the prob¬
lem. And we don’t know what to do,” lamented a senior State
Department official in October 1985.

SIXTEEN

A BLUNDER
LEADS TO AN ELECTION

“THERE’S AN OLD SAYING that victory has
a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” President Kennedy
remarked after the Bay of Pigs debacle. How true that proved to
be in the Philippines. No one wanted to bear responsibility for the
twenty years of Marcos, but many were those who sought credit
for his ouster and the return to democracy, an outcome which
brought hosannahs for the United States and the Reagan admin¬
istration.

It was Ferdinand E. Marcos, however, who set in motion the
events that led to his ignominious flight from the country. Through¬
out his career he had faithfully adhered to the advice his father
had given him as a young man: “Don’t start a fight until you know
you can win it.” Now he faltered. Several times. The first mistake,
from which all others would follow, came on November 3, 1985.
That was the day Marcos announced that he would hold a “snap
election.” The next regularly scheduled presidential election was
not until 1987. Had Marcos not decided to advance the date, he
would have (barring death or a coup, which, though being con¬
sidered, was unlikely) remained as the country’s president. Even
if he had decided not to run in 1987, he could have probably
handpicked his successor, anyone from Enrile to his son or daugh¬
ter. Marcos embarked down the fatal electoral path against the
advice of his wife and his closest advisers. They all were strongly
opposed to an election. Marcos ignored them, making the an¬
nouncement when Imelda Marcos was in the Soviet Union, where
she had ventured again, after another spree in New York.

After the elections had led to Marcos’s ouster and brought

390

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 391

into office Corazon Aquino, Senator Laxalt sought some credit for
having set the process in motion. Writing in Policy Review, the
magazine of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Laxalt claimed
he had “briefly discussed the idea of a snap presidential election”
during his meeting with Marcos in October. “That’s simply not
true,” says a senior embassy officer, a view supported by the em¬
bassy officers who were with Laxalt during his meetings with Mar¬
cos, those who talked with him afterward, as well as senior State
Department officials in Washington who read the cables from Ma¬
nila while Laxalt was there and talked with him when he returned.
All emphatically insist that Laxalt and Marcos never discussed the
possibility of an election during Laxalt’s visit. But what the de¬
partment didn’t know was that after that visit Laxalt had talked
with Marcos about an early election and recommended that he
hold one.

The State Department was adamantly opposed to an early
election. Even those officers who were most concerned about Mar¬
cos’s remaining in power did not consider an election at this time
to be in Washington’s best interest. “I thought this was going to
be a disaster for everybody,” says a diplomat, reflecting back on
his reaction to Marcos’s announcement. “The only victor was going
to be the NPA.” If Marcos cheated to win, it would help the NPA.
And even if he won honestly, he would continue the same eco¬
nomic policies and plundering, which were fueling the NPA’s growth.
While the State Department wanted Marcos out and wanted an
election, it didn’t want the election now, because it didn’t believe
that the opposition was strong enough or unified enough to take
on Marcos. After twenty years of one-man rule it was going to
take some time for the opposition to build up its organization. For
that reason the official U.S. policy was to use the 1986 municipal
elections as the springboard for the presidential elections a year
later.

Marcos dropped his election bombshell during an appearance
on This Week with David Brinkley. George Will, the erudite con¬
servative columnist and commentator, served up the question. Will
had been thinking about asking Marcos about the possibility of an
early election; then, prior to the show, he talked to Laxalt, who
was also to appear. The Nevada senator suggested that if Will
inquired about an election, he “might get an interesting answer.”

392 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

On the show Will asked: “President Marcos, there is a per¬
ception here that your problems derive from the fact that your
mandate is gone, whatever it once was. . . . And there are some
people here who wonder if it is not possible and if you would not
be willing to move up the election date, the better to renew your
mandate soon, say, within the next eight months or so. Is that
possible, that you could have an election earlier than scheduled?”

Marcos leaned into the pitch he had been waiting for. “Well,
I understand the opposition has been asking for an election. In
answer to their request I announce that I am ready to call a snap
election perhaps earlier than eight months, perhaps in three months
or less than that ...”

Sam Donaldson, ABC’s White House correspondent, who
seemed genuinely surprised, took over. “Are there any catches,
Mr. President?” he asked Marcos.

“I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready,” Marcos shot back.
Donaldson burrowed into Marcos as he often did into the
American president. “Mr. President, are there any catches? Can
anyone run in this election? If Corazon Aquino wants to run, if
Senator Laurel wants to run? Everyone can run?”
“Oh yes,” Marcos assured Donaldson and the American pub¬
lic. “Anyone.”
After a break for the commercials Donaldson kept on. “Okay.
My question is, since the allegation against you is that you have
conducted massive voting fraud in the past, if you hold elections
in 60 days or so, will you allow outside observers into the Phil¬
ippines to oversee the elections to make certain they’re fair?”
Marcos: “You are all invited to come, and we will invite mem¬
bers of the American Congress to please come and just see what
is happening here.”
State Department and embassy officers who had been watching
the show and whose hearts had sunk when Marcos announced the
election recovered when Marcos said he would allow observers in.
“I was elated,” one remembered. They were confident Marcos
could not conduct a fair election and win. Inviting observers proved
to be another Marcos blunder, for instead of overlooking the fraud,
they screamed about it, far louder than anyone expected they
would. (“No third world dictator will ever allow another observer

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 393

team,” a diplomat, pleased with the outcome, said with a laugh
after the election.)

Marcos’s election announcement on the Brinkley show seemed
spontaneous. Of course, it wasn’t. On the Friday before the show
Marcos had again called Laxalt and raised the idea of an election.
Laxalt responded, “If you are going to do that [conduct a snap
election], it would be very dramatic for you to make that an¬
nouncement on the Brinkley show. That would be very effective
for American consumption.”

Laxalt’s suggestion is a revealing insight into what lay behind
Marcos’s idea for the election. It was not an election for Filipinos;
it was an election for Americans, specifically for the American
critics of his regime. Now that he had Washington’s attention (Lax-
alt’s visit had convinced Marcos of that, if of nothing else), he
would show them, put an end to all this nonsensical talk about his
having lost control of the country.

While the State Department might not want an election, the
conservatives around Reagan thought it was a great idea. They,
too, thought an election would silence critics; of course, they thought
Marcos would win. Laxalt told fellow senators that it would be a
fair election. It would make no sense, he reasoned, for Marcos to
announce an election if he would have to cheat to win. It was the
same naivete and faith which had marked American policy toward
Marcos for twenty years. Marcos was suffering from self-delusions
about his popularity; he deluded Laxalt and other Americans. This
time they would be hoisted on their own ideological deceptions.

Marcos’s consideration of an early election was precipitated,
in part, by articles in the San Jose Mercury News in July 1985 about
what became known as the “hidden wealth,” State Department
officers concluded. Three reporters working for six months doc¬
umented how Marcos, his family, and his cronies, often using
offshore corporations and phony names, had accumulated massive
property holdings in the United States. In the Philippines, oppo¬
sition leaders in the Assembly began impeachment proceedings,
which, even though certain not to go very far, were unpleasant for
Marcos. In the United States the articles, which later earned the
Pulitzer Prize, spurred more investigations. In early August ABC’s
20/20 devoted a segment to the hidden wealth. A week after that

394 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

the Village Voice weighed in, enlarging on the scandal with details
of the Marcos property holdings in New York: In September 1981,
Imelda Marcos had, for $51 million, purchased the Crown Building
on Fifth Avenue; five months later it was the Herald Center, on
Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway, for $60 million; and more.
After the Village Voice articles Congressman Solarz decided to
hold hearings. It wasn’t just that he was chairman of the Asian
subcommittee; he was also from New7 York. Once Marcos an¬
nounced the election, Solarz became determined to hold his
hearings far enough in advance of voting day so that they would
influence Philippine voters.

In calling for an election, Marcos had wounded himself. The
blood was on the water. From every direction came help to inflict
the mortal blows: American liberals; diplomats and public officials;
members of Congress and their aides. In order to trap Marcos,
however, U.S. officials found it necessary to maneuver Ronald
Reagan into a corner from which the only exit was to abandon
Marcos.

All these interlopers meant well, convinced that six more years
of Marcos would be disastrous. In their involvement in Philippine
affairs they were acting in the tradition of Lansdale and the CIA
back in the 1950s. When the CIA had drugged President Quirino,
it was because Washington had decided Ramon Magsaysay would
make a better president. When the CIA had passed out money to
congressional candidates (in violation of Philippine law), it justified
the illegality with the rationalization that it was being done “to
change their country for the better,” as Joseph Smith, the CIA
agent in charge of the operation, had observed. “We did not think
that we were interfering in the political life of the country.” That
same attitude prevailed in 1986. No one seemed to be disturbed
by the fact that the Philippines was a sovereign, independent na¬
tion. In the minds of many Americans, it was still an American
colony. Americans had to save the Filipinos.

One of the first outsiders to involve himself in the Philippine
political process was Richard Holbrooke, who as Carter’s assistant
secretary of state had fashioned and presided over the policy that
allowed Marcos to remain in power. Now he would get behind
Mrs. Aquino. Holbrooke, who hadn’t been in the Philippines since

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 395

the 1980 New Year’s Eve blowout at Malacanang, was en route
to China, in his capacity as an investment banker, and decided to
stop in Manila. Since he was a former assistant secretary and had
some clout within the Democratic party (the State Department
was anxious for bipartisan support for its Philippine policy), the
embassy welcomed him. Moreover, the embassy’s political officer,
Scott Hallford, had worked for Holbrooke during the Carter years
and believed that Holbrooke had helped advance his career.

Hallford met Holbrooke at the airport, put him up at his home,
and arranged his meetings, which included Marcos and Mrs. Aquino.
The embassy hosted a breakfast for Holbrooke, so he could talk
with the opposition leaders. Holbrooke had some advice: Avoid
being portrayed as anti bases or soft on communism. A few weeks
later Holbrooke, speaking at a conference in Los Angeles about
the Pacific basin, again chastised the Philippine opposition. “I am
concerned that they have not renounced completely the thought
of a tactical alliance with the Communists,” Holbrooke said. “This
they should do, however expedient such an association might look
to some of them in the short term. There are too many historical
examples of democrats who were eaten alive by their erstwhile
Communist allies to trust such an arrangement now.” There were
a few Philippine opposition leaders in the audience, and they were
angered by Holbrooke’s comments. His views of the Philippines
and communism were the same as those of the Reagan adminis¬
tration. They did not take kindly to his telling them how to deal
with the Communists. After all, as they saw it, the American policy
of supporting Marcos had only helped the Communists grow stronger.

While in Manila, Holbrooke confused and irritated Mrs. Aquino.
When the two met, she had not yet been selected as the opposition
candidate. During their one-hour meeting at her house, while her
daughter sat on the couch doing her homework, Holbrooke pressed
her about whether she really wanted to run for president. The
election would probably be fraudulent, Holbrooke said. Why should
she allow herself to be used? She was perplexed but concluded
that he did not want her to run. After their meeting she called
several Americans and asked what Holbrooke was all about. Was
he speaking officially? Was that the American position, that she
not run? “It was a serious misunderstanding,” says Holbrooke.
“It’s absolutely not true that I didn’t want her to run. She mis-

396 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

understood me.” An embassy officer who was present agrees with
Holbrooke.

Once Aquino had decided to run, the task was to unify the
opposition, because a divided opposition was just what Marcos
was counting on. Though there were several men and women who
wanted to run, two emerged as the most likely candidates: Corazon
Aquino and Salvador (“Doy”) Laurel. Laurel, whose father had
written the Supreme Court decision exonerating Marcos for the
Nalundasan murder, represented Philippine politics-as-usual. “Doy
would be more of the same of Marcos, and worse,” a leading
businessman said at the time. From a wealthy family Laurel, who
had a law degree from Yale, was something of a playboy. He was
also conservative, and many in Washington, particularly at the
White House, would have preferred him as the candidate; he was
one of the few opposition leaders who were not in favor of re¬
moving the bases. Because Laurel was so much like Marcos, he
could not have made an appeal that would have defeated Marcos.
But Laurel had enough political power that he had to be reckoned
with.

It was Cardinal Sin’s job to get Aquino and Laurel on the
same ticket. “He’s one of the best politicians in the Philippines,”
says a very senior U.S. diplomat whose contacts with Sin spanned
a decade. “If he hadn’t been cardinal, he’d be president. If not
president, the pope.” As for Pope John Paul II’s edict that priests
should stay out of politics, it has been as inconsistently applied as
was the Reagan administration’s human rights policy. The pope
might enforce that edict in Nicaragua but not in the Philippines.
Besides, Sin had a personal relationship with John Paul, dating
back to when they both had served on the same synod committee.
The two men got along well, the pope enjoying his meetings with
Sin. After one luncheon in Rome, as Sin was departing for Manila,
the pope said with a straight face, “Say hi to Imelda.”

Sin leaned hard on both Aquino and Laurel, she to accept
him, he to accept the number two spot. The cardinal also made
sure each of them realized that the American embassy was of the
same mind, as it was. The embassy delivered that message to the
two Philippine politicians through every third party the U.S. dip¬
lomats could find. “These people were bombarded,” says a Foreign

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 397

Service officer. “Absolutely overwhelmed.” Solarz weighed in; so
did John Kerry, the liberal senator from Massachusetts, who as
freshman member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had
decided to pay particular attention to the Philippines. Laurel backed
off, accepting the number two spot in exchange for promises to be
named prime minister and foreign minister.

Aquino’s campaign had barely begun when it was dealt a se¬
vere blow. It came in the form of an interview with The New York
Times.

“What on earth do I know about being President?” she ad¬
mitted having told those who had urged her to run. “The only
thing I can really offer the Filipino people is my sincerity.” She
told The Times that she did not have a specific program of gov¬
ernment. That vagueness, that seeming lack of purpose and strength
were bad enough for those American officials who had been sup¬
portive of her as an alternative to Marcos. But even more of a
blow was what she said specifically. First, she said she favored
removal of the bases. Then she was asked about the Communists
and the NPA. Her first response was to refer to a Jesuit priest who
worked in the slums and had briefed her. Then she added that the
“majority” of those who supported the NPA were “not really
Communists.” She would, if elected, she explained, propose a
cease-fire and a dialogue.

It’s hard to imagine what Corazon Aquino could have said
that would have sent more shudders through the White House.
To the conservatives, her view of the Communists was simply
naive, at best. It is a fundamental, unalterable tenet of conservative
ideology that it is not possible to negotiate with Marxists. Period.
And it’s not just conservative Republicans who believe that. That
was precisely what Richard Holbrooke, a Democrat, had said in
his speech in December.

No matter when Mrs. Aquino had expressed those views of
communism and the NPA, there would have been a strong reaction
in Washington. But what transformed a tremor into an earthquake
was that her remarks came at about the same time an article ap¬
peared in the conservative Commentary magazine about the NPA.
The title was “The New Khmer Rouge.” Twenty pages long, writ¬
ten by Ross H. Munro, a Time magazine correspondent, it was as

398 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

chilling and strident as the title suggested.* Those in the NPA,
according to Munro, weren’t just Communists. They were the next
Khmer Rouge. No discussion. No debate. There was no question
mark in the title, which had been selected by the author, not by
the magazine. The Philippine Communists were not only brutal
but everywhere, according to Munro. They had infiltrated unions,
political organizations, human rights groups, and the church. He
wrote shrilly of “clerics turned killers” and of “secret cells inside
the Catholic Church.” Lest he hadn’t set off enough panic, Munro
wrote that if the Communists were victorious, they would align
the Philippines with the Soviet Union.

The impact of Munro’s article was considerable. Stephen S.
Rosenfeld, editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post,
devoted a column to it and acclaimed it as “arresting.” The ex¬
ecutive editor of The New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, had the
Munro article with him when he arrived in Manila in mid-December,
one stop on a journey through Asia which included South Korea
and Indonesia. Rosenthal, a hard-line anti-Communist who be¬
lieved that his correspondents had been too soft in their reporting
on the Sandinistas before and after they came to power, wanted
to be sure that his correspondent in Manila, Seth Mydans, didn’t
make the same errors when reporting about the NPA. The sub¬
sequent Times coverage of the NPA reflected many of Munro’s
conclusions.

There were, however, serious weaknesses in Munro’s article,
and the embassy recognized them. “It’s a bit like a two-hundred-
and-fifty-pound ballerina balancing on one toe,” an embassy officer
said at the time. “Impressive but not much support.” Even Jim
Nach, the author of the most authoritative study of the NPA, to
whom Munro had talked at length (much of what Munro wrote is
contained in Nach’s cable), thought that Munro had overstated
the brutality of the NPA, had stretched the facts to suggest that

* Time magazine editors were not pleased with what Munro had done, and
Time's correspondent who covered the Philippines, Sandra Burton, was even
more upset. It wasn’t just the polemics of the article that bothered them; it was
more the fact that Munro, who had previously worked in the Philippines for
Time, had left the impression with people he interviewed that he was writing
the article about the NPA for Time.

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 399

the Philippine Communists would be like Pol Pot. (Nach thought
an NPA government would be more similar to the Marxist gov¬
ernments in Mozambique and Angola.)

The embassy prepared a classified analysis of the article. Bos-
worth noted that Munro had pursued the matter of the CPP and
the NPA “as a labor of love.” He had done “an excellent job
describing the CPP’s use of force, the party’s growth, and the
dangers it poses to the Philippines—and to U.S. interests.” The
embassy added, however, that Munro “has overstated the CPP/
NPA’s use of terror in the Party’s successes to date.” The embassy’s
conclusion was that “the communists are careful about using terror
and specialize in ‘Robin Hood’-like activities, including the liq¬
uidation of corrupt, abusive officials and, less often, especially
effective ones.” The embassy also faulted Munro for “unconfirmed
assertions about a Soviet angle.” As Nach had noted in his study,
“improper links” between the Philippine Communists and the So¬
viet Union “cannot be demonstrated.” Indeed, Defense Minister
Enrile, during a long breakfast meeting in August 1984, told Dep¬
uty Assistant Secretary of State John Monjo that the Philippine
government had “not been able to substantiate outside material
support for the CPP/NPA although there was a recent report al¬
leging Vietnamese support.”

In Washington Munro’s article was quickly overtaken by the
focus on the election and most immediately by The New York
Times interview with Mrs. Aquino. The paper had run long ex¬
cerpts from the interview because Rosenthal, who had been present,
was so stunned by what he heard—“it was almost embarassing,”
he says about the interview—that he thought only the text could
convey how “vague and rambling” he thought her answers had
been. Rosenthal wasn’t alone in this reaction. Warren Hoge, the
paper’s foreign editor, who also participated in the interview, was
also surprised and dismayed. Running along the edge of Manila
Bay the morning after, he could talk about little else. He had
interviewed a lot of politicians, domestic and foreign, during his
career. He had covered Washington during the Watergate years
for the New York Post, had been deputy metropolitan editor for
The New York Times, and spent five years in Latin America (in¬
terviewing right-wing Bolivian generals who trafficked in cocaine

WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

and left-wing Sandinistas) before becoming The New York Times
foreign editor in 1983. He had never, he said, found a leader who
seemed so ill prepared.

That was precisely what the interview told conservatives around
Reagan who wanted to continue supporting Marcos. They could
point to the interview and say in effect, See, look what’s going to
happen if she wins. She’s not strong. She’s not forceful. She’s a
housewife. She’ll force us out of the bases, and she’ll make a deal
with the Communists. It wasn’t only the conservatives who were
alarmed by what they read in The New York Times. The number
three man in the State Department, Michael Armacost, who had
played a key role in gradually moving the policy away from Marcos,
was concerned about what he might have set in motion. “Armacost
began asking, ‘Is this lady serious?’ ”

While the interview had been “devastating, even more devas¬
tating was Rosenthal’s observation that he thought she was naive,”
says a senior State Department official who was involved in formu¬
lating the policy. In Rosenthal’s own words, she was “unprepared”
to be president. That’s what Rosenthal told Ambassador Bosworth
in Manila and upon his return, what he said directly to Secretary of
State Shultz as well as to guests during a White House affair he at¬
tended. “His opinion was very influential for a long, long time around
the White House,” Shultz said later. In the weeks that followed,
Reagan himself, along with his advisers who wanted to stick with
Marcos, often buttressed their criticisms of Mrs. Aquino by saying,
“This is what the editor of The New York Times thinks of her.”

Mrs. Aquino didn’t know about what was going on in private
between The New York Times and official Washington, but the
interview alone embittered her toward The Times, a resentment
she harbored long after the election and her victory. She said she
didn’t know that it was to be a formal interview; she thought it
was an informal chat. But if Mrs. Aquino didn’t realize it was an
interview, in part it was because she was a neophyte in dealing
with the press. Though the interview was in her home and on a
Sunday evening, which might suggest a less than official air, Ro¬
senthal was accompanied by his foreign editor, Hoge, and the
paper’s Manila correspondent, Mydans; there was a tape recorder
prominently placed on the table; and Susan Meiselas moved about,
taking official photographs.

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 401

No matter why Mrs. Aquino handled the questions as she did,
the interview was a serious blow to her incipient campaign. Out
of the destruction, however, rose the desperately needed construc¬
tion. While the interview provided ammunition for Mrs. Aquino’s
enemies, it also convinced her friends that they had better act,
quickly and decisively. And they did.

At the center of a team that stretched from Manila to London
to New York and Washington was Robert Trent Jones, Jr., the
golf course designer who had known Cory Aquino for twenty years
and had tried to secure her husband’s release from prison back in
1975. One week after The New York Times interview appeared,
Jones, on December 23, went to the Menlo Country Club, where
he knew Shultz was playing golf. The course, on the San Francisco
peninsula, was where the two men had golfed together during the
years that Shultz had taught at nearby Stanford University and
been the head of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation. That
day Jones passed the time at the practice range until the secretary
of state finished his round. Then they talked.

Jones explained that he was going to help Mrs. Aquino. A
receptive Shultz told Jones to stay in touch with Armacost. It was
a tilt toward Aquino, the first of what became a lean. When Jones
discovered on the day that he was to leave for Manila that his
passport had expired, he called the State Department. Within an
hour he had a valid passport. Even more, Armacost, disturbed by
the fallout from The New York Times interview, recommended to
Jones that the New York-based public relations firm D. H. Sawyer
& Associates be hired for Aquino’s campaign. And in Manila
diplomatic and military officers in the embassy would help the
Aquino effort, though indirectly and very carefully. “They were
straining the limits of the mandate to stay neutral,” says an Amer¬
ican who worked informally for Mrs. Aquino.

Jones moved on two fronts: in the Philippines and in the United
States. His first major move was to bring Mark Malloch Brown
into the Aquino campaign. One of Brown’s principal missions was
to avoid another New York Times debacle. Brown, a tall, some¬
times disheveled-looking thirty-two-year-old, was “a shark in an¬
gels’ clothing,” as an admirer describes him. He was a journalist
who in 1979 had worked for the United Nations high commissioner
for refugees along the Thai-Cambodian border. For the past sev-

402 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

eral years, he had been employed by the Economist first as a
political correspondent, then as editor of the Economist Devel¬
opment Report. When Brown began working full-time for Mrs.
Aquino, he left the impression that he was still working for the
British magazine, no doubt to help her gain business backing.

For more than a year Brown had been discussing with D. H.
Sawyer & Associates the possibility of his working for them. He
was ready to join but postponed doing so. The Aquino campaign,
Brown explains, “took pains to say there was no American in¬
volvement.” Since Brown was British and not on Sawyer’s payroll
(he went on it after the Philippine election), it was possible to
make this claim, but only by some considerable stretching. Jones
was paying Brown’s fare, and there were other Americans involved
in her campaign, even if they weren’t officially on her staff.

One of them was William Overholt, the Bankers Trust vice-
president based in Hong Kong who had participated in the seminar
at the National War College in August. He was an adviser to Mrs.
Aquino’s campaign policy committee, which was chaired by Jaime
Ongpin, the forty-seven-year-old Harvard M.B.A. corporate ex¬
ecutive who had always been close to the American embassy but
was even more welcome there now, with many embassy officers
strongly pro-Aquino. Overholt kept the embassy informed gen¬
erally of what he was doing for Aquino, and he found that the
embassy’s diplomatic and military officers were supportive, going
about as far as they could to help without exposing themselves to
charges of partisan interference. One of Overholt’s schemes (which
didn’t have any American embassy involvement) was for a rally
in Hong Kong. His idea was to gather in a plaza the 30,000 Filipinos
working as domestic maids there. Aquino would give a speech,
and bags would be passed among the crowd; but they would already
have been secretly filled with money, collected from wealthy peo¬
ple. Thus, there would be a double impact: raising money and
leaving the impression that the average Filipino wanted Cory Aquino.
Overholt was forced to drop the plan when Hong Kong officials
denied him a rally permit.

Though it may not have been on Mrs. Aquino’s staff, Sawyer’s
firm (the one Armacost had recommended) was certainly helping
her, even waiving its normal fee, which would have been about
$250,000. It was symptomatic of the Philippine election that both

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 403

candidates had retained American public relations firms and that
those firms concentrated on American, not Philippine, audiences.
D. H. Sawyer was considered a Democratic firm; one or two of
its associates had worked in the Carter White House, and the firm
usually represented Democratic candidates in congressional races.
Marcos, on the other hand, had Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly,
conservative and very Republican. Paul Manafort set out to dem¬
onstrate that Mrs. Aquino was soft on communism and would
throw the United States out of the military bases. Through his
own connections he was able to deliver that message to conser¬
vatives around Reagan. To reach a wider audience, he arranged
for three journalists to go to the Philippines: Robert Novak, the
conservative columnist; John McLaughlin, the conservative and
provocatively contentious host and spark on a political roundtable
show; and Fred Barnes, the New Republic’s political reporter who
was seen as giving the once-liberal magazine an increasingly con¬
servative stance on foreign policy issues.

Jones, working with and through Sawyer’s firm, carried out
what he called the “second campaign.” It was aimed at the Amer¬
ican audience, especially the policymakers, to convince them that
Corazon Aquino could be trusted. An informal advisory board,
“Friends of Aquino” it called itself, was established to spread the
message. The principal apostles were Solarz, Holbrooke (at first
Mrs. Aquino was reluctant to have him involved because of her
encounter with him in November), and Rafael Salas, who had
been Marcos’s executive secretary back in the 1960s but had split
with Marcos and for many years had been working at the UN in
New York as the executive director of the Fund for Population
Activities. And, of course, Jones.

Golf being the sport of politicians, Jones had a special cachet
with many members of Congress. His effectiveness was enhanced
because he was considered moderate to conservative, and he had
contributed to many a Democratic campaign. He focused his lobby
efforts on personal friends in the Senate: Bill Bradley, who was
from his native New Jersey; Sam Nunn, a longtime golfing com¬
panion from Georgia; and Alan Cranston, senator from California,
where Jones now made his home.

In the Philippines Mark Brown directed Aquino’s media cam¬
paign. First he had to persuade her that notwithstanding her bitter

404 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

experience with The New Yovk Times, she had to meet with the
foreign press. He prepared her for the sessions by playing the role
of the nasty reporter. Then he went to work on her image: that
she was tough, trustworthy, and competent. And they framed her
responses to the issues, the ones of concern in America. Those
were communism and the bases. Four days after saying publicly
that she would allow Communists in her cabinet if they renounced
violence, she reversed herself, declaring unequivocally to a gath¬
ering of 700 businessmen, “I would like to assure everybody here
that I will not appoint a Communist to my cabinet.” It’s doubtful
that many Philippine voters were concerned about communism;
that was an obsession in Washington. So was the bases issue. As
the embassy had reported, based on its meetings with opposition
leaders prior to the start of the campaign, “As far as the US bases
are concerned . . . they would not be a major campaign issue.”

Mrs. Aquino was opposed to the bases in principle. As a
nationalist she didn’t like the foreign influence; as a woman and
Catholic she was sickened by the seediness surrounding the bases,
the abuse and exploitation of women, the thousands of teenagers
who had turned to prostitution. But her position on the bases didn’t
play well in Washington. So she modified it. She said she’d honor
the agreement, which ran until 1991; then the issue would be
considered anew. Brown explained to her that she could get away
with that position, that Felipe Gonzalez in Spain and Andreas
Papandreou in Greece had campaigned against the presence of the
American bases in their countries without Washington’s coming
down hard on them.

In general, Aquino had to demonstrate, in the Philippines and
Washington, says Brown, “competence, toughness, and winnabil-
ity.” The last was the most difficult, there existing such fatalism
and cynicism after twenty years of Marcos. Even some of those
closest to Mrs. Aquino, as well as most embassy officers, didn’t
think she could succeed. Aquino was seen as a saint and mother
figure but not a candidate who could win. After the rallies, which
attracted huge and enthusiastic crowds, Brown would tell his can¬
didate, They re going to pray for you—and vote for Marcos.”
The challenge was to give a political edge to a religious campaign.

The strategy was classic dirty democratic strategy,” says Brown.
“We had to get her down from the high road. She had to attack

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 405

Marcos personally.” Mrs. Aquino was reluctant. She had said at
the outset that she would not attack Marcos personally. That was
not her style or her nature. Finally, she was persuaded.

The ammunition for the attacks came from the United States.
First she went after corruption and hidden wealth. After the stories
in the San Jose Mercury News and Village Voice, major newspapers
began investigations. Solarz kept the issue alive by holding hear¬
ings, subpoenaing the Marcoses’ agents in the United States to
testify. Each day there would be new revelations: another multi-
million-dollar building or apartment here; another offshore cor¬
poration that was really part of Imelda Marcos’s vast financial
empire. Each disclosure would be trumpeted by the media. A circle
was tightening around Marcos.

Then came another scandal, made for Aquino’s campaign:
Marcos’s war record.

An American professor at the University of New South Wales
in Sydney, Australia, Alfred W. McCoy, uncovered, then dissem¬
inated the smoking documents. A historian and prolific writer,
McCoy lived in the Philippines for several years, researching and
writing articles and books, including an account of the priests im¬
prisoned, then later deported by Marcos. While doing research for
a book about World War II in the Philippines, McCoy discovered
official U.S. government records in the National Archives in Wash¬
ington, D.C., which revealed that Marcos’s claims about his war¬
time exploits were fraudulent. McCoy uncovered the lode, which
he copied without the archives staff’s realizing what he had, in the
summer of 1985.

When Marcos announced the election, McCoy realized that
now was the time to go public. He went first to the Los Angeles
Times syndicate, hoping that he could write the article himself.
The syndicate passed the material to the paper’s foreign desk. No
interest. So McCoy went to the Washington Post, to John Sharkey,
the reporter who had exposed Marcos’s fraudulent war medals
claims back in 1983 (in an article that went virtually unnoticed at
the time). Sharkey brushed off McCoy with some lame reason.
Finally, McCoy called Seymour Hersh, the man to whom all jour¬
nalists seem to go when they have exposes. Hersh was too busy
finishing his book about the shoot-down of Korean Airlines 007
and referred McCoy to his friend at The New York Times Jeff

406 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

Gerth. Gerth had been investigating the Marcos’s financial activ¬
ities for several months (and not having much success getting his
stories into the paper until the Marcos empire began to crumble).
He took the story to his boss, Washington bureau chief Bill Ko¬
vach. Kovach assigned not only Gerth but also Joel Brinkley and
Stephen Engelberg. It was a formidable team.

Beginning on Friday night, January 17,1986, the three of them
took McCoy’s material and followed up, finding other documents
and locating, then interviewing men who had served with Marcos
in the Philippines during World War II. marcos’s wartime role
discredited in u.s. files was the headline at the top of page
one of The New York Times the following Thursday. The next day
the Washington Post had a front-page story by John Sharkey, going
beyond what The Times had written. Sharkey had documentary
evidence which suggested that Marcos’s father had been a collab¬
orator during the war and that Marcos may have been as well. It
seemed astonishing that the Post had been able to come up with
such an explosive and well-researched story so quickly. But it
wasn’t so quick. Sharkey had put off McCoy because Sharkey had
already written his own story. It had been in the hands of editors
for two months, and after McCoy had called on him, Sharkey, not
wanting to be scooped, had sent memos to his editors, alerting them
that someone else was on to the story. Nothing had happened.

But now it was open season on Marcos. His affair with the
press was over. For twenty years so many reporters had treated
him with reverence and respect. The times had changed; the hounds
were loose, sniffing out corruption, tearing away the wartime fab¬
rications. Two years earlier, in December 1983, when Sharkey had
written his story about the war medals fraud, the Post had run it
not as a news story but rather in the Sunday Outlook section,
which, though a place for long and thoughtful articles, was not
where the newspaper placed its most important stories. And at
that time other newspapers and journalists, as well as members of
Congress, had ignored it. Now The New York Times story was
splashed across the front page; across the country the story was
reprinted. It generated congressional cries for an investigation.

But though all these charges of corruption and phony medals
were front-page and prime-time news in the United States, there
was a serious problem for the Aquino people: how to get the news

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 407

to the Filipino voters. Contrary to what Senator Laxalt believed,
Marcos controlled the press and kept Aquino out. Laxalt wrote,
in his Policy Review article, that:

the election campaign was as free and open as any we have
had in the United States. The Aquino people complained
about time on television, but that was the same complaint
that American politicians usually make: you can’t get time
on TV unless you buy expensive time on the air. Mrs. Aquino
had rallies all over the country, and she and a very vigorous
opposition press were able to make the strongest statements
with impunity. I don’t think anyone can say that freedom of
the press or freedom of assembly were [sic] suppressed during
the campaign.

It was a description that bore no relation to reality. Aquino
couldn’t get time on TV, not even if she had been richer than Mar¬
cos. Marcos controlled television, and radio, and the newspapers.
It was as if CBS were owned by Nancy Reagan, ABC by Maureen
Reagan, and NBC by Paul Laxalt, while all the newspapers except
for one in Alaska and maybe another in Alabama were owned by
Reagan’s friends. Even that wouldn’t adequately portray what Mrs.
Aquino was up against. The owners of American newspapers and
television stations will sell time to anyone who has the money. The
Filipino owners would not. When the major Philippine newspapers
reported early in the campaign about Mrs. Aquino’s rallies, Marcos
personally called the editors. “He came down on them like a ton of
bricks,” a journalist told Seth Mydans of The New York Times.
“Equal access, that’s a laugh,” another columnist said. Aquino’s
rallies drew tens of thousands, flashing the Laban party’s L with the
thumb and forefinger, a sea of yellow shouting “Cory, Cory, Cory.”
On the rare occasions that Mrs. Aquino was covered on television,
the reporters had instructions not to show the size of her crowds, or
to film close-ups of her, and in most cases not to include the sound
of her speeches. The Times summed it up in its headline: in

MANILA PRESS, IT’S “CORAZON WHO?”

To overcome this press blackout, Mark Brown and the other
advisers devised a scheme at once elaborate and simple. It was
based on the principle in American journalism that a person about
whom something negative is said is to be given an opportunity to

408 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

respond. This meant that Marcos would be called upon to answer
the charges about his real estate holdings and his war record. The
Aquino campaigns in the United States and in Manila coordinated
their efforts. Thus, McCoy alerted Brown in Manila when he knew
that The New York Times story about the phony war medals was
to run. Brown began preparing his candidate to seize the issue,
while in New York Aquino advisers alerted the networks that the
story was about to break. When it did, the networks called Marcos
for a response. And then the linchpin of the scheme came into
operation: Since anything Marcos said was news, the Philippine
television stations naturally ran excerpts of Marcos’s American
television appearances. In order to make sense of his denials,
Philippine journalists had to provide some background on the
charges. Thus did the scandals reach the Philippine people.

But for all the clever efforts and overwhelming support Mrs.
Aquino was gaining in the Philippines, the Reagan administration,
or at least the president and his closest advisers, were still hanging
in with Marcos.

Less than two weeks before the voting Reagan’s chief of staff,
Donald Regan, declared that even if Marcos were elected by “mas¬
sive fraud,” the Reagan administration, while condemning the
fraud, would still “have to do business with Marcos.” Regan, ap¬
pearing on This Week with David Brinkley, added, “There are a
lot of governments elected by fraud.” Indeed there were, and the
United States knew about the frauds, and the United States en¬
dorsed the governments. In the Panamanian election of 1984 a
military strongman, General Manuel Antonio Noriega, stole the
election for the military’s candidate, Nicolas Ardito Barletta. The
vote rigging and fraud were reported at the time to Washington
by the CIA and the embassy in Panama, but Secretary of State
Shultz attended the inauguration, bestowing the blessings of the
Reagan administration.

Though Regan’s statement that no matter what, Washington
would do business with Marcos may have seemed cavalier, it was
consistent with the policy of sticking with Marcos. While American
liberals were working for Aquino and calling for Marcos’s ouster,
leading American conservatives were Marcos enthusiasts. Col¬
umnists Evans and Novak backed him by raising all the Red scares.

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 409

The Philippine election was nothing less than one for “life-and-
death,” they intoned. An Aquino victory would mean not only
change but “radical” change, they charged. They concluded that
“the sound of her campaign is not liberal reform. It is revolutionary
zeal for vengeance and change, promising an uncertain and dan¬
gerous future for the Philippines.”

The most influential of Marcos’s champions outside the gov¬
ernment was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in late 1985 was being cham¬
pioned by many on the political right as its next presidential
candidate. At the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas,
she had roused the crowd with a speech in which she sharply
castigated the Democrats because of what she said was their pro¬
pensity to “blame America first” for the problems in the world.
Now, Kirkpatrick, in several of her syndicated columns, blamed
Marcos’s problems on Foreign Service officers, on Stephen Solarz,
on journalists—on everybody but Marcos. “Marcos opponents in
the U.S. Congress, the State Department and the press challenged
his war record, his use of U.S. aid funds, his health, his ability to
deal with the Communist New People’s Army,” she wrote. She
didn’t explain why there shouldn’t be concern about the misuse of
U.S. funds. Or even about Marcos’s health. After all, hadn’t Wash¬
ington’s lack of knowledge about the shah’s cancer contributed to
the devastating outcome in Iran? Nor was she troubled by the
facts, for it hadn’t been the State Department but a historian who
had challenged Marcos’s war record.* As for concern about Mar¬
cos’s ability to deal with the New People’s Army, no less an official
than Admiral Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was
most alarmed, as well he should have been. Above all, however,
Kirkpatrick blamed the press: “. . . from reading the American

* Kirkpatrick wasn’t the only one quick to blame the State Department for the
wartime fraud stories. Charles Krauthammer of the New Republic saw them as
part of “an orgy of meddling” in the Philippine election. A supporter of Amer¬
ica’s covert wars in Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua, Krauthammer found
“nothing covert to this operation” in the Philippines. “Administration officials,”
he was sure, “leak evidence, buried for 40 years, that Marcos fabricated his
history as an anti-Japanese guerrilla in World War II. . . .” The next day
Krauthammer was forced to run a correction when he discovered that it had
not been Reagan administration officials who had leaked the documents but
that the evidence had “emerged through the work of independent investiga¬
tors.” This correction ran before the Kirkpatrick column.

410 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

press, one would think that President Ferdinand Marcos is the
‘focus of evil’ in the world and that his government is the major
threat to American interests in Asia. Day after day, American
newspapers, news weeklies and network newscasts treat Marcos’
real and imagined failures, inefficiencies and corruption as if they
were extraordinary and unique. They are not. Of 159 member
states of the United Nations, at least 100 are probably governed
more poorly than the Philippines.”

The former United Nations ambassador didn’t mention any of
those states that were more poorly governed. Though there cer¬
tainly were some, they weren’t governments that had received
billions of dollars in U.S. aid over the years and had once been
America’s “showcase of democracy.” There probably weren’t more
than a handful of states in that category. This was the tragic failure
of the American policy: that in spite of all the U.S. aid and at¬
tention, the Philippines under Marcos was poorly governed. Kirk¬
patrick would have been hard pressed to come up with an example
of a ruler and his wife whose corruption was more extraordinary,
the Marcoses and their friends having salted away between $5 and
$10 billion—in New York office buildings, European castles, Swiss
bank accounts, offshore corporations. In embracing Marcos, Kirk¬
patrick pulled out the familiar conservative saw: Whatever Marcos
was, the future might be worse. She ran through the litany: “Re¬
member Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam,
Lon Nol of Cambodia, the shah of Iran, Anastasio Somoza of
Nicaragua?” The message was clear: Better stay with Marcos.
Then, for added fear, she threw in a reference to the “brutality”
of the NPA, as “graphically described by Time magazine corre¬
spondent Ross H. Munro in the current issue of Commentary mag¬
azine.” Kirkpatrick’s comments could not be dismissed lightly.
They reflected the thinking of most of those around Reagan.

Though conservative political ideology might be setting the
country’s political course, and Ronald Reagan was at the helm,
the president and his conservative allies couldn’t control every¬
thing. They couldn’t control Marcos, whose cheating in the election
was so massive that it couldn’t be ignored. They couldn’t control
the media, which brought the election cheating and violence into
the living rooms on the evening news and onto the breakfast tables
in the morning papers. And most of all, not Ronald Reagan, not

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 411

Donald Regan, not anyone else in the White House could control
the one man who it seemed would be the most reliable ally. That
man was Richard Green Lugar, Republican senator from Indiana.
It was he who delivered a blow to Marcos, and to the White House
policy, from which there was no recovery. It may not have been
the final punch, but it was decisive, all the more potent because
it was unexpected.

Lugar was a moderate conservative and loyal to the president.
But when he went to observe the election in the Philippines and
saw the fraud, he refused to look the other way. Some of his aides
joked that Lugar was particularly well qualified to recognize elec¬
toral fraud, being from Indiana. His press spokesman, Mark Helmke,
liked to recall how as a boy, in a politically active family, his
grandfather had taught him to insert a piece of metal in a voting
machine to prevent the pull of the lever next to an opponent’s
name from registering. It was generally accepted that to win in
Gary, Indiana, it was necessary to steal 20,000 votes. Lugar, a
fifth-generation Hoosier, had some firsthand exposure to electoral
skulduggery. In his first run for mayor of Indianapolis in 1967,
Lugar, who was thirty-five, faced an opponent whose brother was
the district attorney; on election day many of Lugar’s poll watchers
were conveniently arrested.

It was a combination of the vicissitudes of the American po¬
litical system and shrewd maneuvering by Lugar’s staff that set the
stage for him to play the hero’s role in the return of democracy
to the Philippines. It had begun in 1985, when Lugar, first elected
to the Senate eight years earlier, became chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. The chairmanship was available
because Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, had been defeated,
in part because conservatives had campaigned against him, viewing
him as too moderate. With Percy out, the conservatives wanted
Jesse Helms to take over the committee chairmanship, as he could
have done, being the Republican with the most seniority. How
different history might have been—and in the Philippines it almost
certainly would have been—had Helms, a strident conservative
who routinely supported dictators as long as they were anti¬
communist, become chairman. But a senator may be chairman of
only one committee, and Helms, bowing to the pressures of the
powerful tobacco growers in his home state of North Carolina,

412 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

chose the Agriculture Committee, where he could protect tobacco
subsidies.

As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Lugar hadn’t
devoted much attention to the Philippines until his aide Fred Brown
returned from his two trips with the dire reports and began lob¬
bying his senator to become involved. The Rhodes scholar learned
quickly about the archipelago, and when Marcos called the “snap
election,” Lugar began to move. First, he sent a letter to Marcos.
As committee chairman Lugar had earned a reputation for being
able to fashion bipartisan support for a policy, so the letter was
signed by the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, and the ranking Democrat
on the East Asian subcommittee—and one of the most liberal
members of the Senate—Alan Cranston of California. The letter,
also signed by the chairman of the East Asian subcommittee, Frank
Murkowski, who was now beginning to pay some attention to the
Philippines, outlined what Marcos needed to do to ensure a free
and fair election; in other words, congressional meddling in Phil¬
ippine domestic politics was bipartisan.

One of the conditions the four senators established was “equal
access to the media, including radio and television.” Marcos and
the Reagan White House were trapped by this condition. If Marcos
allowed equal access, he would lose, and if he didn’t, his critics in
the United States would argue that it had been a fraudulent election
because one of the very conditions set by Lugar had not been met.

In addition to the letter, Lugar and Pell asked an independent
organization, the Center for Democracy, to go to Manila in early
December, to examine the preparations being made for the elec¬
tion and determine whether the election would be fair. It was a
cautious move, the delegation members being selected to ensure
that there would not be any radical, or even liberal, proposals.
The center was headed by Allen Weinstein, a university professor
and author who described himself as a Democratic supporter of
Ronald Reagan. Upon returning from a week in Manila, Weinstein
and the five other members of his delegation hastily drafted their
report, under pressure from Lugar, who wanted to bring it before
the public before the long Christmas recess.

The center s report touched all the bases: the media, the mil¬
itary, ballot boxes, registration of voters, and the organizations

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 413

that would monitor the election. One was the official government
organization, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC). In their
letter Lugar and Pell had called on Marcos to appoint “a genuinely
impartial” COMELEC. It was another trap because Marcos could
not win a free election. The commission was not “genuinely im¬
partial,” its members being appointed by Marcos and beholden to
him. Again, therefore, if Marcos had won, his critics could argue
that this condition had not been satisfied.

The other monitoring organization was the National Citizens
Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), which was, as its
name implied, a citizens’ organization to monitor elections. NAM¬
FREL relied heavily on trained volunteers to observe the voting
on election day. Lugar and Pell had called on Marcos to accredit
NAMFREL and to ensure that it could “function freely, having
full access to polling places nationwide.” NAMFREL’s roots went
back to the early 1950s, when it was created by Ed Lansdale with
CIA funds for the campaign of Ramon Magsaysay. The organi¬
zation had disappeared during the martial law years but been
resurrected in 1983, and it had played a vital role in Assembly
elections in May 1984, elections which were considerably more
fraudulent than the Reagan administration acknowledged but which
were less so than they would have been without NAMFREL.

The United States was to fund NAMFREL for the 1986 elec¬
tion, though NAMFREL and American officials repeatedly denied
that it had received any American money. NAMFREL leaders
said that it had been offered but refused; in fact, however, NAM¬
FREL had initiated at least one request for funding. To hide the
U.S. funding of NAMFREL, indirect channeling mechanisms were
used. NAMFREL was made up of nearly 100 organizations, from
the Girl Scouts of the Philippines to the Knights of Columbus to
the Consolidated Automotive Parts Producers Association. The
U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) made a grant
of $390,000 to the Asia Foundation, a nonprofit organization which
had been set up by the CIA in the early years of the Cold War
and which still receives a considerable amount of its funding from
the federal government, though it is believed to have severed its
ties to the agency. The money was used for such activities as the
training of poll watchers and vote counters and the establishment
of what became known as Operation Quick Count, which was

414 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

designed to counter the time-honored tactic used by dictators to
slow or stop the count when it is going against them. The foun¬
dation didn’t do these things directly but gave the $390,000 in the
form of grants to a number of Philippine organizations that were
going to be active in the election, such as the Catholic Association
of the Philippines and the Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference for
Human Development. Both of these groups were components of
NAMFREL.

NAMFREL also received money from the National Endow¬
ment for Democracy (NED), which had been set up in 1983 after
Reagan had called on the private sector to help spread the Amer¬
ican way around the world. The endowment received its funds
from Congress (that is, from American taxpayers) and in turn made
grants to international organizations, most of them conservative
and controversial. Weinstein had been NED’s acting president
until he was replaced by Carl Gershman, a former aide to Jeane
Kirkpatrick. Congressman John Conyers, a liberal Democrat from
Michigan, once blasted NED as “clearly one of the most mischie¬
vous and unjustified expenditures of public funds that we’ve seen
in some time.” The congressional law creating NED, Conyers
wrote, “should really be known as the Taxpayer Funding for For¬
eign Elections Act.” In the 1984 presidential election in Panama
$20,000 of NED money had gone to Barletta, the man who fraud¬
ulently won. In the Philippines at least $3 million was “quietly
being spent to fight the communist insurgency . . . and to cultivate
political leaders there,” the San Francisco Examiner reported in
July 1985. Some of that money was channeled to NAMFREL.

Altogether, according to individuals familiar with the funding
and the mechanisms, slightly less than $1 million was provided
NAMFREL. In addition, the organization received money, sur¬
reptitiously, from the Japanese government and Japanese busi¬
nessmen. Major “contributors” were American businessmen living
in the Philippines who were members of an organization called
Republicans Abroad. An offshoot of the National Republican party
(the Democrats have a similar organization, though not as large),
Republicans Abroad chapters exist in nearly every country and
are a source of donations and absentee votes. (After the Philippine
election, during those tense days when the pressure was on Reagan
to abandon Marcos and accept Aquino, the argument was made,

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 415

somewhat impishly by those with knowledge of this funding mech¬
anism, “But, Mr. President, the Republicans are for Cory. She’s
a Republican.”)

NAMFREL didn’t use all the money for the election. It in
turn was quietly supporting the Reform the Armed Forces Move¬
ment (RAM), that group of officers who were seeking to end the
corruption within the military and had the enthusiastic endorse¬
ment of U.S. officials, from Bosworth in Manila to Armacost and
Armitage in Washington.

Putting aside the issue of secret American intervention in the
Philippines’ domestic politics, funding NAMFREL, and RAM,
could be viewed as neutral, designed to foster democracy. But
though ostensibly neutral, NAMFREL, again like RAM, was a
haven for anti-Marcos forces, almost by definition: Anything that
fostered democracy was ipso facto anti-Marcos. But the tilt toward
Aquino didn’t stop there. The United States also secretly funded
Radio Veritas, the church-owned radio station in the Philippines,
probably the most widely respected and listened-to voice of op¬
position to Marcos. Conservatives in the administration who were
pro-Marcos allowed the funding of NAMFREL and Radio Veritas
for a number of reasons. In part, it was because they were not
sufficiently knowledgeable about the Philippines and the organi¬
zations to realize what they were beneath their ostensibly neutral
surfaces. Additionally, the conservatives were confident that Mar¬
cos could win; his victory would have a seal of approval if NAM¬
FREL were a credible watchdog.

As election day drew near, the only major issue remaining
pertained to American observers. As chairman of the Senate For¬
eign Relations Committee, and having sent the Weinstein team to
the Philippines, Lugar was the obvious choice to lead a delegation.
But he had very mixed feelings. He liked the process of politics,
and his experience as an official observer to the Guatemalan elec¬
tions in 1985 had had a positive impact on him. In that Central
American country, Washington’s intervention had been successful,
a moderate Christian Democrat, Vinicio Cerezo, emerging as the
first democratically elected civilian president after a succession of
brutal military regimes. But the chances for a successful outcome
in the Philippines weren’t as great as they had been in Guatemala

416 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

or in El Salvador before that. Both those elections had been vir¬
tually run by the United States, from the ballot boxes to the devices
to guard against double voting to the counting of the ballots. Mar¬
cos wasn’t about to allow that. So it seemed like a no-win situation
to Lugar. If it were a fraudulent election and he gave a‘ seal of
approval, he would be tarnished. If Marcos cheated, and Lugar
said so, the White House and conservatives would not be pleased.
But Wolfowitz at State and Armitage at Defense were pressing
Lugar, and Shultz himself made an appeal. Lugar agreed to go.

“This is when the White House really starts screwing around,”
says an aide to Lugar. Again the White House was trapped, by
Lugar and the State Department, working together. The White
House wasn’t anxious to send observers to this election. The re¬
ports from Manila, from the embassy and the CIA, were that as
in the past, Marcos was preparing to cheat to the full extent nec¬
essary and that he would have to do so in order to defeat Mrs.
Aquino. It would be easier to continue supporting Marcos if Amer¬
icans didn’t observe the fraud. But Marcos had invited observers,
and Lugar, a respected Republican leader in the Senate, had vol¬
unteered to go. It was a bit difficult for the White House to say
no. Moreover, observer teams had served the administration well.
They had endorsed the fraudulent Panamanian election and their
endorsement of the Salvadoran elections in 1982 and 1984 (in which
the CIA spent $2-$3 million to bring about the desired outcome)
had been a tremendous boost for the administration’s policy in
that country. The White House’s hope was to put together a team
that would do the same for the Philippine elections, a team it could
control and count on to endorse a fraud.

The members of the observer team were decided in negotia¬
tions among Lugar, who agreed to go only if he were involved in
the selection process, the State Department, and the White House.
Lugar wanted a bipartisan team. Solarz was the obvious Demo¬
cratic leader. He declined, knowing that the election would be
fraudulent and not wanting to be in the position of endorsing it.
The ranking Democrat was John P. Murtha, congressman from
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who became cochair of the official del¬
egation. Murtha s role in the ultimately successful outcome was
far greater than he was publicly credited for, his failure to be
acknowledged in part because of his relatively quiet demeanor,

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 417

which in this case was compounded by Lugar’s virtual monopoly
of the media attention. Most of the other members were selected
not because they knew anything about foreign policy or the Phil¬
ippines (the two exceptions being Larry Niksch, the Philippine
specialist at the Congressional Research Service, and Allen Wein¬
stein, who had studied the process in December) but because of
domestic politics, good old-fashioned logrolling. Thus, Senate Ma¬
jority Leader Robert Dole, from Kansas, was successful in placing
the Kansas secretary of state, Jack H. Brier, on the team. The
White House political operatives wanted Norma Paulus, thinking
the exposure would help her in her race for governor of Oregon.
(It might have helped, but not enough. Paulus lost in November
1986.) One of Lugar’s choices was Van P. Smith, from Indiana, a
former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lugar also
wanted Otis Chandler, chairman of the Los Angeles Times pub¬
lishing company. Chandler agreed to go, but the White House,
doing all it could to subvert the observer team—“really dragging
its feet” on the whole observer issue, was how a State Department
officer put it—delayed so long that by the time it said yes, Chandler
had other commitments.

As possible members of the observer team for the Philippine
elections, the State Department sent eighty to ninety names to the
White House. It cut most of them as too liberal, too independent,
too unreliable. The White House “wanted a safe team,” says a
State Department officer, adding that the group that was sent was
“very conservative.” The White House secretly had some assist¬
ance in putting it together from Marcos’s public relations firm,
Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, which vetoed people on State’s
list and added names of its own. This angered Lugar, who didn’t
mind trading with other politicians and the White House but thought
that outsiders and clear partisans should not be involved. One of
those whom the White House put on the team was Fred Fielding,
the president’s White House lawyer. “He was our watchdog, and
so be it; we all knew it,” says Helmke, Lugar’s press secretary,
who was on the trip. Patrick Buchanan, the most ideologically
conservative member of the White House staff, suggested Ben J.
Wattenberg, a prominent neoconservative commentator and writer,
and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, a real estate developer as well as
chairman of the Atlantic Monthly and editor in chief of U.S. News

418 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

& World Report. * Neither of these men had been on the long State
Department list. Zuckerman wasn’t contacted about being an ob¬
server until five days before the group was to leave. “It came out
of the blue,” he says, adding that he had to cancel thirty-two
appointments in order to go.

The first skirmishes within the observer team occurred on the
plane, somewhere between Alaska and Tokyo. Fielding began
arguing that the delegation should shorten the amount of time it
would spend in the Philippines. The voting was to be on Friday,
and the delegation had planned to remain until Monday. Fielding
asserted that for reasons of security and safety it should not remain
that long. It was a specious argument. The most significant fraud
might come not on voting day but in the counting that followed.
Fielding wanted the team out of the country before that happened.
A bitter argument ensued. Lugar’s aides were strenuously opposed
to the early return, and at one point the senator snapped at them
“to shut up.” Upon landing in Tokyo, Fielding called the White
House to bring the president abreast of what was happening; a
State Department officer with the delegation, John Finney, who
was Maisto’s deputy, alerted Bosworth in Manila about the ma¬
neuvering to get the delegation out of the Philippines quickly.
When the delegation arrived, Bosworth, who early on had urged
Washington to send observers, took Lugar aside and explained
why it was critical that the observers remain until Monday. They
did.

Friday, February 7, was voting day. It was also the day that
halfway around the world, another long-reigning corrupt dictator
and his avaricious spouse were forced to flee their country: Pres¬
ident Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier and his wife, Michele,
of Haiti. They departed the island nation they had bled and im-

The members of the U.S. presidential delegation were: Lugar; Murtha; Sen¬
ator Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi; Senator Frank Murkowski,
Republican of Alaska; Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts;
Representative Samuel S. Stratton, Democrat of New York; Representative
Robert Livingston, Republican of Louisiana; Representative Jerry Lewis, Re¬
publican of California; Representative Bernard J. Dwyer, Democrat of New
Jersey; Jack Brier, secretary of state, Kansas; Fred Fielding; Admiral Robert

r. J, Lo”8; Natalie Meyer, secretary of state, Colorado; Reverend Adam J.

Mmda, Green Bay, Wisconsin; Larry Niksch; Norma Paulus; Van P. Smith;
Ben J. Wattenberg; Allen Weinstein; Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 419

poverished in a U.S. military jet. In the Philippines the American
observers fanned out across the country. At a high school in Makati
Lugar watched as the votes were tabulated. According to the reg¬
ulations governing the election, tabulated votes were to be sent
immediately to the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), where
they were to be posted for public observation. A few hours later,
when Lugar went to the COMELEC headquarters, the Makati
votes had not been posted. He was disturbed.

A key issue in the fairness of the election was the “quick
count.” The classic ploy of dictators around the world has long
been to stop the count when results start to show that they are
losing, then to resume it after the alterations have been made to
provide the margin of victory. Thus, from the beginning of the
involvement in the Philippine election, there had been an emphasis
on a quick count. Lugar and Pell had made it one of the conditions
in their letter to Marcos in November; Weinstein and the Center
for Democracy had discussed its importance in their report. Lugar,
once again moving Reagan into a corner, wrote in his letter to the
president accepting the appointment as head of the observer del¬
egation that the quick count would be “of special interest to the
official U.S. observer delegation.”

When Lugar asked the COMELEC officials why the Makati
count hadn’t been recorded, he was assured that it would be very
soon. Lugar returned to the Manila Hotel and spoke with Bos-
worth, who informed him that on the basis of the reports coming
in from embassy officials in the field, Aquino was doing even better
than expected. After dinner Lugar returned to COMELEC. It was
now about ten o’clock; the vote tabulations Lugar had seen several
hours earlier in Makati still had not been recorded. Lugar was
convinced he was being lied to. For him, that was the turning
point.

Lugar spoke out. “I think we’re in a situation where obviously
the count has been slowed and obviously someone is worried,” he
said. He also commented on what he said was “frankly a very
disturbing pattern” of fraud and violence in the election. Lugar’s
statement angered other members of the delegation. On the flight
to Manila they had agreed that no one would make any statement
until the group could gather and issue one jointly. The leader of
the delegation was violating the agreement.

420 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

Down in Mindanao, where he had spent the day hopping from
village to village in a helicopter, Graeme Bannerman, staff director
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, heard his boss’s re¬
marks about the election. He was stunned. It wasn’t just that
Bannerman was a conservative who thought a Marcos victory in
a clean election would be best for the Philippines (a view that some
thought pulled Lugar one way, while Fred Brown, who was also
along, pulled the senator the other). It was more that Bannerman
had been sent to Mindanao to keep a leash on Senator John Kerry,
the most liberal member of the observer delegation, to prevent
him from spouting off, but here was his boss, the conservative
Richard Lugar, speaking out.

On Sunday afternoon the observers gathered at the embassy,
to hear each other’s reports and to prepare a joint statement. It
was a “contentious, vociferous meeting,” as one described it.

“We are telling Washington,” Bosworth said in reference to
the embassy’s reporting, “there was a systematic effort to limit the
vote and manage the number. Not just computer glitches, but the
insipid [sic] manipulation of a fragile process.” Lugar explained
that from 10 to 40 percent of the voters might have been disen¬
franchised, kept even from casting their vote through a purge from
the registration roles of people thought to be pro Aquino. It was
the “boldest stroke,” Lugar said, and “something we weren’t even
watching for.”

The conservatives in the delegation wanted to stress the pos¬
itives of the process: the enthusiasm of voters; the role of NAM-
FREL. “We saw an extremely stirring vision of democracy,”
Wattenberg said. “No matter who wins, this was good for the
United States.” A few days later, after returning to the United
States, he described the election as “a very poetic display of de¬
mocracy which in many ways was more open and public than what
we have in the United States.” Fielding, during the meeting, urged
the delegation not to issue any statement. “We shouldn’t involve
ourselves further.”

Senator Kerry and Allen Weinstein led the effort for a state¬
ment that condemned the fraud. Kerry cautioned, however, that
it not be so strong that Marcos could use it to declare the election
null and void. That would have meant that Marcos could continue
in office until a new election; the CIA had gathered some intelli-

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 421

gence that Marcos was preparing to do just that. Because of his
liberal politics, Kerry risked being dismissed by conservative mem¬
bers of the delegation, who made up a strong majority. Therefore,
rather than get out front, he allied himself with Lugar, careful to
avoid anti-Marcos rantings, couching his positions in moderate
language. Admiral Robert L. J. Long, a former commander in
chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC), also stressed the
importance of mentioning the fraud in the statement. “We have
to make a gloved threat to Marcos.”

After a discussion that lasted nearly three hours, Lugar as¬
signed aides from his staff, Murtha’s staff, and Allen Weinstein,
to draft a statement. They expected to have it ready in a couple
of hours. But each draft precipitated a fight, with the conservatives
trying to water it down, the drafters wanting to toughen it. Back
and forth the drafts went, until six o’clock in the morning. The
conservatives prevailed. The statement stressed the “passionate
commitment of Filipinos to democracy,” the “vigorous campaign,”
“lively debate,” and long lines of people waiting to vote, a dem¬
onstration of the Filipinos’ “faith in democracy.” The fraud was
addressed in only one paragraph: “Sadly, however, we have wit¬
nessed and heard disturbing reports to undermine the integrity of
[the electoral] process . . . serious charges have been made in
regard to the tabulation system.”

The statement would have been an even greater whitewash of
the fraud and endorsement of the election had it not been for one
event on Sunday evening. It was the turning point for many of the
delegation, conservatives and liberals agree, and caused them later
to issue individual statements stronger than the joint declaration.
Francis X. Clines, of The New York Times, captured the event
best, in one sentence of his story: “Weeping and fearful, the Gov¬
ernment computer workers arose from their terminals and, data
disks in hand, darted from the Commission on Elections to make
the charge that the Marcos Government was rigging the presiden¬
tial vote.” The computer workers made their way to safety and
refuge in the Church of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, where a
crowd gathered to pray and cheer for them. Several members of
the observer delegation rushed to the church. It was a dramatic
moment. “The church incident revealed that many young people
were willing to take risks in order to express their concerns,”

422 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

Zuckerman said. “What affected me was the fact that these people
were willing to walk out under very dangerous circumstances.”
(On his return to the United States, however, Zuckerman contin¬
ued to stress the positives of the election and criticized the press
for dwelling too much on the fraud. “Violence, intimidation, fraud
and voter disenfranchisement made headlines in the United States,
but they were not nearly as newsworthy in the Philippines,” Zuck¬
erman wrote. “What is newsworthy, in my judgment, is that we
have seen the creation and operation of a new structure for Phil¬
ippine democracy.”)

By the next morning, Monday, two of the conservative dele¬
gates, Senator Cochran and Admiral Long, had been converted,
“radicalized,” said one member of the delegation. Cochran, whose
conservative ratings were in the eighties and who was a Reagan
administration loyalist, pointedly wore his yellow golf slacks, Aqui¬
no’s campaign color. When the delegation stopped in Hawaii, en
route home, it became clear that Admiral Long had also turned
around. Long, who after his retirement had been appointed the
chairman of the commission that investigated the bombing of the
Marine headquarters in Beirut in November 1983, was put on
the Philippine observer team to ensure that the delegation would
appreciate the strategic importance of the archipelago. In Hono¬
lulu, at his old CINCPAC headquarters, an air force brigadier
general, during a briefing, routine for a delegation of this stature,
defended the Philippine elections, saying that there had not been
that much fraud. The retired admiral interrupted, bluntly inform¬
ing the officer that he was wrong.

Before departing from the Philippines, Murtha had a conver¬
sation with Bosworth and an aide. “It’s very clear to me what’s
happened,” Murtha said. “The people want him [Marcos] out, and
he doesn’t want to go.” The observations had an impact. Murtha
is an ex-marine who doesn’t say much,” an embassy officer noted.

Just the opposite of Lugar, who talks and talks. But when he
[Murtha] does say something, you listen.”

It was over for Marcos—at least as far as the embassy, the
State Department, critical members of Congress, and many influ¬
ential conservatives were concerned. After the election Marcos
even lost George Will. It had been Manafort’s strategy to put

A BLUNDER LEADS TO AN ELECTION 423

Marcos before the American public as often as possible, believing
that he could captivate the American people as he had American
officials for twenty years. Marcos was everywhere: several times
on Nightline; NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation;
ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today; CNN’s Cross¬
fire; PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer and John McLaughlin’s One on One.
The strategy backfired. Marcos exposed himself for what he was.
On the Sunday after the election, he was on This Week with David
Brinkley, again. Asked about the charges of fraud, he denied them
emphatically. As for the slow count, well, he said, that was because
some of the country’s towns “are in the mountains,” and he placed
the blame on “foul weather ... a depression and the winds are
very high . . . accidents.” It was becoming a verbal slapstick rou¬
tine, the journalists playing straight man to Marcos. How was it
possible, David Brinkley asked, that in one town Marcos had re¬
ceived 13,643 votes and Aquino 0? Marcos could explain that: The
town was close to his hometown; the voters were “probably my
relatives.”

George Will brought up the war medals issue. He noted that
one of Marcos’s defenses to the fraudulent war record charge was
that the Japanese emperor Hirohito, in his memoirs, had attested
to Marcos’s exploits against the Japanese during the war. How
could that be, Will wondered, since “the only public words by
Emperor Hirohito are on marine biology and botany”? Marcos
answered: “If you think—if you, the Americans, who are our allies
think that I was not in this, then you should read the memoirs
of his majesty, the Emperor, in his memoirs he speaks of Mar¬
cos—”

Will cut him off. “They’ve not been published, sir!”
Later Will called the White House. Their man Marcos, he
said, was an “inveterate liar.” State Department officials who learned
of Will’s loss of faith were delighted. Now the task was to convince
the president of the United States. In the end it was the Filipino
people who did so.

SEVENTEEN

TO THE END

THE OBSERVER team was on the way to the Manila
Airport when Ambassador Bosworth informed Senator Lugar that
because of the escalating crisis, Secretary of State George Shultz
would like him to come directly to Washington to brief President
Reagan. In spite of all the reports the embassy had been sending
about the fraud, the White House was still clinging to Marcos.
Lugar had planned to go from the Philippines to Indiana, not
wanting to be another Foreign Relations Committee chairman who
fell victim to constituents who thought the man they elected should
be paying less attention to foreigners and more to their needs. A
suitcase with his winter clothes, including a cold-weather jogging
suit, was waiting for him in Indianapolis. But having come this far
with the Philippine election, Lugar couldn’t turn back now. Nor
could he say no to the president.

Lugar arrived at Andrews Air Base about midnight, and know¬
ing that the White House was upset with his comments about the
fraud, he avoided the reporters waiting in the cold rain. At ten
the next morning, Tuesday, he appeared at the White House, along
with Murtha. Fielding was present, as were Reagan’s national se¬
curity adviser, John M. Poindexter; Chief of Staff Regan; and
Secretary Shultz. Knowing that Bosworth had been under bitter
attack from all quarters—Fielding had sent messages from Manila
accusing him of being in Aquino’s camp; Imelda Marcos had un¬
leashed her tirades about him to Nancy Reagan; Marcos himself
did the same in his almost daily conversations with Laxalt—Lugar
made a point of praising Bosworth and the embassy staff. (After
the meeting Shultz thanked Lugar for his support of the belea-

424

TO THE END 425

guered ambassador.) During the thirty-five-minute meeting, de¬
scribed by one observer as “very serious,” Lugar summarized for
the president the fraud and violence that had marked the election.
Still concerned that Marcos was looking for a reason to declare
the election null and void, the senator was careful not to go too
far. Lugar realized later that maybe the strategy had been a mis¬
take, that his caution had reinforced what the conservatives were
saying: that the fraud hadn’t been as bad as the embassy and press
were reporting it to be. For the most part Reagan listened, asking
few questions, speaking anecdotally. At one point the president
made reference to having seen Aquino supporters dumping ballots
in the street. Lugar didn’t know what he was talking about, and
his aides never were able to find when and where the purported
scene had been televised.

That evening Reagan held a news conference. The first ques¬
tion, from Mike Putzel of the Associated Press, was, as expected,
about the Philippine election: “The observers you sent to the Phil¬
ippines have just returned with reports that they witnessed fraud
and violence. Couldn’t this undermine the credibility of the elec¬
tions and strengthen the hand of the Communist insurgents in the
islands?”

Reagan, behind the lectern in the red-carpeted East Room,
answered: “Well, Mike, I’m, I am just not going to comment on
this process, just as they are not going to render an official report
until the counting has finally been finished.”

That was the answer the president’s advisers had prepared him
to give. But Putzel followed up: “Did what they tell you give you
concern about the credibility there and what the impact will be for
U.S. interests in the Philippines?”

Reagan answered: “Well, I think that we’re concerned about
the violence that was evident there and the possibility of fraud,
although it could have been that all of that was occurring on both
sides. ...”

That was the clangor reported around the world. Later, after
the absurdity of the remark had generated an outpouring of rage,
Reagan’s advisers sought to limit the damage to the president.
They portrayed it as an inadvertent and innocuous misstatement,
one that didn’t reflect U.S. policy. The Washington Post wrote:
“Officials said a communications failure beginning with the pres-

426 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

ident caused the confusion, rather than the kind of deep-seated
divisions that exist among Reagan’s top advisers on many other
issues.” Time called it “a flub pure and simple.”

It had not been a flub. The statement reflected the policy, at
least as it existed in the White House. And there was division in
the ranks. The State Department knew that Marcos had been
responsible for the fraud, and it was now even more strongly con¬
vinced that the United States should not stick by him. The White
House intended to stay with Marcos, fraud or not. That was pre¬
cisely what Donald Regan had said the week before the election.
Moreover, the president believed there had been fraud by both
sides. That was what Marcos was saying. Reagan was hearing it
from Nancy Reagan, who was being fed that line by Imelda Mar¬
cos. And Marcos’s public relations firm, Black, Manafort, Stone
& Kelly, was advancing the same line within Reagan’s conservative
inner circle.

To counter, Aquino’s people in New York went to work im¬
mediately. John Scanlon, a New York public relations consultant
who had been retained by the Aquino campaign, called Peter
Jennings at ABC and introduced one of Aquino’s team to the
ABC anchor; for forty-five minutes they talked, the Aquino aide
explaining that the fraud had been by Marcos. Scanlon made sim¬
ilar introductions to network anchors Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather.
But all this lobbying may not have been necessary; the events now
had a propulsion of their own and played out on the stage for the
electronic global village.

There were a few thousand journalists, including technicians,
in the Philippines for the elections. NBC’s Tom Brokaw had an¬
chored his show from there, as had Jennings. CBS had moved its
entire election polling team to the Philippines, even building a
transmission tower in Mindanao in order to send the results back
quickly. Every night there was something on the evening news
about the elections—for the four-week election period a total of
some 180 minutes on the three evening network news shows, com¬
pared with an average of fewer than three Philippine stories per
year between 1972 and 1981. Marcos consumed much of that tele¬
vision time now, and the more Americans saw him, the more they
recoiled, convinced, as was George Will, that he was a liar. And
everything news watchers were seeing convinced them that Marcos

TO THE END 427

had stolen the election from this saintly woman in yellow. There
were pictures of bodies of people who had been murdered, nearly
all of them, it seemed, Aquino campaign workers. The scene of
the workers5 walking out of COMELEC and going to the church
had been shown and reshown. On the day of Reagan’s news con¬
ference six masked gunmen chased a leader of Aquino’s campaign,
Evelio Javier, forty-three years old, across the square in San Jose
de Buenavista, leveled their rifles, and shot him dead. It was re¬
ported on the front pages of American newspapers and broadcast
on the evening news along with President Reagan’s speech. The
funeral a few days later was shown on television.

Congress was in recess the week after the Philippine election,
and in districts from Maine to California senators and represen¬
tatives were being told that it was time for the United States to
dump Marcos. Lugar was hearing that even from his constituents.
In the middle of Reagan country, they were in love with Cory
Aquino. Lugar was attending Lincoln Day dinners and Chamber
of Commerce lunches, and all he was hearing from Republican
businessmen was adulation for Aquino. He also heard praise for
his role; for once, people were telling him, America had come
down on the side of the good guys instead of the dictators.

Thirty-six hours after Reagan’s statement Lugar told an As¬
sociated Press reporter in South Bend that the president was “not
well informed.” It was a strong statement for a Republican senator
about his president. It was not, however, the only one reflecting
the public outrage. In Salem, Oregon, Republican Senator Mark
Hatfield, who had been entertained at Malacanang on the day of
Aquino’s funeral, called on Marcos to resign. Republican Dole of
Kansas reacted to Reagan’s remark by publicly asking the Pen¬
tagon to undertake priority studies about relocating the bases. The
most outspoken was Georgia Senator Sam Nunn.

Again, it was Robert Trent Jones, Jr., who had brought Nunn
into the fray on behalf of Mrs. Aquino. Jones had first met Nunn
during a round of golf on California’s Monterey Peninsula in the
late 1970s. Over the years they had played golf, and the friendship
had grown. After Reagan’s news conference Jones reached Nunn,
who was in Geneva observing the arms negotiations. En route
back to the United States, Nunn prepared his response, which he
read to Jones before he sent it. Declaring that Aquino was the

428 WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR

winner, Nunn charged that Marcos was trying “to steal the election
by massive fraud, intimidation and murder.” He called on Reagan
to notify Marcos that all U.S. aid to the Philippines “will be ter¬
minated if the will of the Philippine voters, as expressed *at the
ballot box, is not followed.” The protest by the Democratic senator
was amplified because he was the ranking Democrat on the Armed
Services Committee and, even more, because he frequently sup¬
ported the president on defense, security, and foreign policy issues,
including the MX and aid to the contras.

But Reagan’s news conference statement struck hardest in the
Philippines, sweeping away everything in the path to restoring
democracy, like one of the typhoons that frequently savage the
islands. For a few days Americans had been heroes, greeted more
enthusiastically than they had been since their country liberated
the islands during World War II. Filipinos generally considered
that Marcos had been pushed to the election by Americans, and
they were aware of what Lugar had been saying. Reagan’s state¬
ment swiftly dissipated all the goodwill. “I have never been so
ashamed to be an American,” recalled Charles Krause, who had
been in many parts of the world where American policy wasn’t
very popular, including Nicaragua and El Salvador. Krause, who
had worked for the Washington Post and CBS before joining
MacNeil/Lehrer, had been invited to a dinner party by some wealthy
Filipinos. After Reagan’s statement he wasn’t much in the mood.
“I wanted to crawl under the bed and hide. ... I just did not
want to see or talk to any Filipinos, I felt so ashamed.” But he
went, and he spent the evening unable to explain Reagan’s remark
to the small group of upper-class Filipinos. “They were bewil¬
dered.”

Embassy officers, exhausted after weeks of numbingly long
hours, were demoralized. “It was a real body blow,” recalled one
senior officer. “We couldn’t explain to our friends; we couldn’t
explain to our enemies, to anyone. They just couldn’t understand
how the president of the United States could say that.” Above all,
they couldn t explain it to themselves. They had worked so hard.
Practically the entire embassy staff had been pressed into service
for the elections. A week before the voting two-person teams had
been sent to provinces near and far, to observe the election process,

ome of the teams knew their provinces well. When the reports